A literary network in northern Germany
From October to January, LiteraTour Nord will be visiting the cities of Oldenburg, Bremen, Hanover, Lüneburg, Lübeck, Rostock, and Osnabrück. The readings will take place in literary centers and bookstores and will be moderated by university lecturers who will discuss the texts with students in accompanying seminars beforehand. This creates a lively exchange between the university, the literary world, and the public.
The 2025/26 season is remarkable in several respects: for the first time, the tour features exclusively female authors. With Nora Gomringer, Dorothee Elmiger, Daniela Dröscher, Katerina Poladjan, and Annett Gröschner, five influential voices of contemporary German-language literature are going on a reading tour. They deliberately do not meet on their LiteraTour routes, but they are united by their shared commitment to literary relevance and diversity in form and content.
LiteraTour Nord is also designed as a literary competition. All participating authors compete for the LiteraTour Nord prize, which is awarded by the VGH Foundation and endowed with €15,000. The fact that they are part of the reading tour is already an honor in itself: all five have gone through a selection process and won over a large jury. This initial committee consists of around 15 people and is made up of LiteraTour Nord's cooperation partners – representatives of North German literary institutions, universities, and bookstores from all seven participating cities. However, the final decision will not be made until after the tour. The organizers and moderators will then come together and be joined by the audience, who will cast their votes at each venue.
Katerina Poladjan and the dream destination of Golden Sands
One example from the current season was the reading by Katerina Poladjan at the Theater am Goetheplatz in Bremen, where she presented her novel Goldstrand. Poladjan, who was born in Moscow and grew up in Rome and Vienna, is known for her concise, dense texts that unfold historical contexts in a confined space. In Golden Sands, she focuses on the history of a resort on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast, which was planned in the 1950s as a socialist project for the future.
The narrative follows film director Eli, who, sixty years after his success, finds himself in a personal and artistic crisis and reconstructs his family history. The novel takes us through various European locations—from Odessa to Constantinople and Varna to Rome—and spans the entire 20th century. Topics such as socialism, fascism, and persecution are addressed without overloading the text. Moderator Axel Dunker, professor at the University of Bremen, emphasized how Poladjan succeeds in combining historical gravity with narrative lightness, describing her novel as "nevertheless an easy read."
During the discussion, the author spoke about how biographical references often find their way into her writing unintentionally, even though she does not consciously write autobiographically. For her, Golden Sands is both a personal “place of longing” and a literary space where East and West meet. The reading clearly demonstrated what LiteraTour Nord stands for: literature as a medium that links individual experiences and major historical developments and invites joint reflection.
The authors Matilda Glinski and Fenja Barwig are in their fifth semester of a bachelor's degree program in communication and media studies as their major and German studies as their minor at the University of Bremen. The article was written as part of the seminar “Text Types and Formats in Online Journalism” taught by Dr. Andreas Rothenhöfer. For their research, they attended Katerina Poladjan's reading at Theater Bremen to get an idea of what LiteraTour Nord is like.
